The art of storytelling is nothing new. Just ask Storify co-founder and Hacks/Hackers founder Burt Herman, who stopped by the Post Thursday to discuss Storify and the next generation of the centuries-old craft.

Storify is a Web-based tool that gives non-code-savvy users access to a wealth of APIs, from Twitter and Facebook to YouTube and Instagram. Storify gives anyone the opportunity to create a rich and engaging story centered around anything from a news event, such as the blackout of Wikipedia in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act, to a family gathering. "It's about narrative, it's about taking readers on a journey and I think that's kind of lost a bit today online when it's all about real time and streams and just kind of throwing all this stuff out there," said Herman.

The platform was born of an innovation process that started with trying to make a better-looking Twitter interface, and then it evolved into a way for users to embed a tweet into a blog post. "That seemed to really have a lot of interest," said Herman, "that kind of got us to where we are today."

'It very much was an iterative process in learning from our users," he continued.

Just as Storify was created by going beyond Twitter, it encourages users to go beyond journalism, pulling from a diversity of sources, rather than using a single medium, such as a blog post, print story or a video. And, Herman says, this is just the beginning.

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